Heat - Suggestions for Improvement

[Jigsawn]

Back again with a 4th base under my belt (it's about to go pear-shaped at about 150 cycles). I have a lot more feedback on helping make the game more accessible and fun to play. This time I am splitting it between topics to avoid an uber-thread. Original feedback from my first few attempts is in this thread.

Heat

Currently the most difficult and most poorly communicated mechanic to deal with in the game. Overall the biggest challenges for new players in dealing with heat are:

A: Understanding where heat is coming from

B: Knowing how to minimize heat

C: Learning about cooling solutions

Please see this thread and this thread for a more detailed look at my trials and tribulations with heat, and all the things I was only able to learn about with the help of the forum here. It's worth noting that with 4 decent bases under my belt, I'm hardly a new player ( I must have well over 100 hours playtime now), yet dealing with heat is still a complex, and hard to understand concept in the game.

Suggestions for Improvement

Heat Related Tips - More tips and tooltips about dealing with heat encroachement, cooling solutions and heat sources.

Better Education About Insulation and Hot Biomes - In particular tips and so on about insulation, hot biomes and the massive importance of abyssalite (hopefully you add other good insulation materials to the game). Also, teach the importance of constructing out of different materials for insulation purposes. Currently if you do not insulate your base from hot biomes and heat producing machinery, you will die fairly quickly. But even understanding the source of your problems is not well explained. Leading on from that...

More Forgiving Heat Biomes/Placement - For new players, I suggest starting them less close to hot biomes, or lowering the hot biome temperatures. This will stop heat becoming such a major issue whilst the player is still learning the basics and other mid-game problems. I was so busy dealing with farming, power, oxygen production and slime biome issues that base overheating comes at just the wrong time. Have it become an issue a bit later in the game, at least for new players on default difficulty settings, giving the player a better chance of adapting to it.

Better Communication of Heat Sources  - When troubleshooting heat issues, it's very hard to nail down where your problem lies. The heat overlay is useful to an extent, but doesn't do a good enough job of showing the big heat sources. I think Buildings that produce a lot of heat should be marked with icons, or number overlays so you can spot the worst offenders, same goes for piping and so on. When I look at a heatmap of my base and just see orange everywhere, it's impossible to tell where to start. Also, buildings which produce a lot of heat should say so in the descriptions. A graphical indicator or scale in building info boxes would do a much better job of communicating the amount of heat they output, to compliment the numbers - letting players see at a glance that maybe building that in the middle of the base isn't such a good idea.

Electroylzers - The heat warning should particularly apply to Electrolyzers which output huge amounts of heat. Warn about this in the building description. Most new players like me will typically switch to electrolzers when algae starts running out, and it can be a long time before you even notice the colossal amounts of heat they are pumping out. As a new player I am not constantly in the heat overlay checking out what every new building is doing, so its a big shock when you randomly discover your main oxygen source is killing you.

Wheezeworts & Ice Biomes - As these are so vital to cooling - point the players in their direction. I didn't even know there were ice biomes, or wheezworts until the forum told me about them during my third base - they were simply too far from my main base and I had never needed to dig out that far. Suggest having breadcrumb trails, like maybe a story thread, beacon, or scanning room which players can use to discover that ice biomes are a thing, giving them a little helping hand in cooling solutions just by doing that.

Insulation Materials - When clicking on existing insulation tiles or pipes, show the material used for construction in the default info box, rather than having to go to the Details tab. When upgrading insulation or determining what needs better insulation, its important to be able to quickly click around and see what materials you have used. 

Thermoshift Plates - These could use a better description/explanation. I had to have the forum explain them to me. Twice I wasted lots of resources building them, misunderstanding how they worked.

Thermo Nullifier - It's a great idea, the description needs some work though. It's confusing at the moment - it says it needs to be submersed in hydrogen (it doesn't, that's just preferred), and yet when you build it, it has a hydrogen intake pipe.

Education about Cooling Gases - According to the forum, hydrogen is very important for cooling. I don't know much science, the numbers in the game mean little to me. So things like hydrogen being a useful gas for cooling would be great to have in the description for the gas when you click on it.

Heat Warnings? - Finally, perhaps heat warnings of some kind would be useful to help new players understand how vital heat management is. My first warning signs were when my plants stopped growing, but by then it's already too late. Every new player I have seen on the forum has died at least once due to farms overheating. Perhaps once your main base starts getting close to 30 degrees, on a deault difficulty game, it should give you tips/warnings so you are aware of the problem.

Overall I think the heat mechanics are cool (boom tish) but just need a lot better communication to the player, so they know where to start in tackling the problem. More, simpler solutions to deal with heat, rather than having to look up on the forum for advanced solutions (or even simple ones like wheezeworts!).  

[Supraluminal]

I agree with all of this. Heat is basically the final boss of ONI (from what I can tell) but the information and tools for dealing with it provided in the game are pretty lousy, especially for new players.

It's hard to even pick a place to start a critique, but one of the biggest problems (which you touch on) is the way heat ramps. It's a non-issue until it's an imminent threat, which does often coincide with other crises in the mid-game effort to stabilize a base. You should start preparing for it from the very beginning of the game but there's no real reason to know or expect that as a new player.

Even if we accept ONI as a learn-by-failing game and concede that players will have to get cooked once or twice in order to recognize the threat posed by heat, that still leaves the question of how they're supposed to identify and implement a solution to the problem. The game nicely dangles this hydrofan thing as an early option to deal with heat, but it turns out that it's nearly useless and instead encasing your central base/farm area in an abyssalite box ASAP is the right first step. I don't know if I would ever have stumbled on that if I wasn't reading the forums. (Alternate first step, learn about the weird cooling bugs and undocumented fixed-output-temp machines and never worry about heat again.)

Honestly, I could generalize a lot of these complaints to other areas of the game, but I'll leave that for another thread. I have some faith that these types of problems will get more attention as development progresses, but nonetheless I hope it's useful for the devs to hear that some of their main systems are kind of messed up right now.

[Jigsawn]

Agreed, I doubt I would have gotten anywhere with my 4th base due to heat, if I hadn't come on here for help and been told about the importance of abysallite encasement, sealing off your heat generating buildings from your base and so on. Even so, you can read my well documented issues with this current 4th base due to heat, with most solutions coming directly from the forum as I'm unable to figure out how to do that in the game.

I think all the creative solutions on here for cooling are amazing, and I think the depth to which you can utilise gases, water, piping etc for cooling are great - but all of that requires A: a very deep knowledge of the game and its systems, or B: pre-existing knowledge of science and good grasp of maths (properties of certain gases, melting points, pressure densities, etc), or of course C: both.

Given time I would love to figure all of that out myself, and I'm sure I could - but the needs of simply surviving in the game don't give you that kind of breathing room to experiment, and the game doesn't teach you enough about all of the possible methods.

I think it's fine not to rely on easy solutions like the fan machine as a permenent measure, especially once you start pushing out into really hot biomes - but perhaps make those simpler heat reduction devices more effective, giving the player more room to think about longer term, more complex cooling solutions. In addition to that, have better education within the game about how the player might be able to utilise some of the properties of ice biomes, gases with good heat transfer properties, cooling pipe loops, and so on.

I think if these kinds of things are implemented, including my suggestions in the OP, and the default spread of heat is lessened a bit, it'll be a much more fun challenge than the current roadblock it currently is. I have the patience to come on here and ask for help, but many players will simply give up with it as it currently stands. 

[ImpalerWrG]

Heat view (or a second related view option) could show the direction and magnitude of heat FLOWS, not just current temps.  A bit like this site displays the worlds winds https://earth.nullschool.net/

Something like this would be highly effective at showing from where most of your heat is coming from and going too and could help players understand insulation by seeing it actually restrict those flows.

[TMarcher74]

Also to maintain normal temperature(comfortable temperature), it will be good to make a device which maintains the temperature(21⁰ C).

[Elendiar]

On 08.03.2018 at 10:51 PM, Supraluminal said:

Heat is basically the final boss of ONI

After finding at least one nullifier its not a problem. At least u can use thermocooling, all u need hydrogen in pipes. With using water from cold biomes, after cooling naphta and using cooled naphta as refrigerant before it sublimate i need heat my base cous too cold

[Dopey]

On 3/9/2018 at 7:22 PM, Elendiar said:

After finding at least one nullifier its not a problem. At least u can use thermocooling, all u need hydrogen in pipes. With using water from cold biomes, after cooling naphta and using cooled naphta as refrigerant before it sublimate i need heat my base cous too cold

I'm usually melting while trying to run vents to and from the thermal nullifier...

My go to lately is dumb, simple compactors full of ice around my hot machines and sad soggy footed duplicants. Heheheh